Health advocates celebrate court-ordered tobacco company ads

BOSTON -- Readers of 40 major newspapers across the country will open their papers Sunday to full-page ads, purchased by tobacco companies, advising that smoking kills an average of 1,200 Americans a day, that nicotine changes the brain, and that there is no safe level of secondhand smoke exposure.

The court-ordered statements, which will run in newspapers including the Boston Globe through next April and for 52 weeks on national TV networks during primetime, are the result of a years-long battle between the Department of Justice and the tobacco industry over its marketing practices and health effects.

Anti-smoking advocates say the statements and the 2006 federal ruling they grew out of are reminders that tobacco use remains a public health problem in the United States and that more action is needed to fight it.

"It is within our reach to win the fight against tobacco, but only if policymakers at all levels stand up to the tobacco industry and put the nation's kids and health first," the American Cancer Society, American Heart Association, American Lung Association, Americans for Nonsmokers' Rights, National African American Tobacco Prevention Network, and the Tobacco-Free Kids Action Fund said in a joint statement.

The groups, public health intervenors in U.S. v. Philip Morris USA Inc.

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, support state and local policies including raising the tobacco-buying age to 21, funding for smoking prevention and cessation programs, prohibitions and restrictions on flavored tobacco products, and "significant tobacco tax increases."

In Massachusetts, advocates have been pushing for statewide legislation that would boost the tobacco age from 18 to 21. The bill (S 1218, H 2864) is before the Public Health Committee, which last session endorsed a similar measure that went on to pass the Senate 32-2.

"I think we've done a great job in Massachusetts around tobacco but we still have work to do," said Allyson Perron Drag of the American Heart Association. "That bill, in particular, we think it's time."

Filed by Rep. Paul McMurtry and Sen. Jason Lewis, the bill also includes new regulations for e-cigarettes and is backed by a majority of state lawmakers, with 104 legislators signed on to the House version of the bill.

Perron said supporters hope to see quick action on the bill once formal legislative sessions resume in January, particularly in the House, which did not take up the measure last session.

In 1999, the federal government filed suit against nine cigarette manufacturers and two industry organizations, alleging they had violated racketeering laws by engaging in conspiracy to deceive the public about the health effects of smoking, the addictiveness of nicotine, and related matters. The Justice Department's case included arguments that tobacco companies falsely denied for decades that smoking and secondhand smoke cause cancer and that they intentionally marketed to young people.

Judge Gladys Kessler wrote in her Sept. 8, 2006 ruling that there was "overwhelming evidence" to support most of the government's claims and said that the complex, seven-year legal battle boiled down to a case "about an industry, and in particular these Defendants, that survives, and profits, from selling a highly addictive product which causes diseases that lead to a staggering number of deaths per year, an immeasurable amount of human suffering and economic loss, and a profound burden on our national health care system."

The 1,682-page ruling ordered the defendants to "make corrective statements" about addiction, the adverse health effects of smoking and exposure to environmental smoke, "their manipulation of physical and chemical design of cigarettes" to enhance nicotine delivery, and the health impacts of "light" and "low-tar" cigarettes."

The ads will begin running next week after what the intervenors in the case described as "11 years of appeals by the tobacco companies aimed at delaying and weakening them."

The corrective statements will include wording that says, "A Federal Court ordered Altria, R.J. Reynolds Tobacco, Lorillard, and Philip Morris USA to make this statement..."

"More people die every year from smoking than from murder, AIDS, suicide, drugs, car crashes, and alcohol combined," one message reads.

Other statements include the notices that smoking is highly addictive, there is no safe level of secondhand smoke, and that cigarettes were intentionally designed to create and sustain addiction.

"For us, it's just showing that, finally, the industry is admitting that they lied and they used those tactics," Perron said.

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